Quentin Tarantino Says ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Is His Closest Movie to ‘Pulp Fiction’

Hollywood has decamped to Las Vegas this week for CinemaCon, the annual trade show held by the National Association of Theatre Owners where the studios and their stars and filmmakers come to showcase their wares for the coming year. Things are just getting under way but one of the early surprises was an unannounced appearance by Quentin Tarantino (along with his star, Leonardo DiCaprio), who said that his upcoming movie about the Charles Manson killings in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is “the closest [film] to Pulp Fiction” that he’s ever made. DiCaprio also called it one of Tarantino’s best scripts.

Pulp Fiction put Tarantino on the map, and while he did work with many of its cast members (like Tim Roth and Samuel L. Jackson) again, and its twisty chapter-based structure has also returned, he never quite made a sequel, or even a spiritual sequel. He branched out into other genres (war, the Western) and he started to stray from Los Angeles as a setting for his work. It sounds like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be a return to an older style for QT, which could be very interesting. Here’s the official plot description:

A TV actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in the film industry during the Charles Manson murders in 1969 Los Angeles.

The movie, which also stars Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, is scheduled to open in theaters in 2019.